One of the great joys in life is playing with words, stretching your vocabulary and finding new ways to express yourself. As someone who makes things up for a living, I people watch and keep an ear out for turns of phrase as a matter of course. Whether it’s stressed out mothers in the supermarket, foul-mouthed squaddies waking up after an all night drinking session, or bemused elderly gentlemen ensuring about computer courses, none of them measure up to the sheer glory that can be a discourse by Lady M.
In addition to her native English, she also speaks French, German, Arabic, and some fairly rusty British Sign Language. This can lead to some conversations taking place in a form of polyglot when she’s tired, ill, or inebriated. When she runs out of vocabulary in one language, she switches to another.
My great amusement though are those times when she stays within the English language and grabs similar words to make entirely new meanings to what she intended. With her bemused permission, I’ll be documenting a few here over time, possibly as a regular feature. We’ll see. Maybe I’ll even make a whole set of pages around it.
Today’s phrase: “It’s been a rough month with all the conditional shit in her life.”
Now, this could have been a reference to someone being penned in with clauses and conditions, but she quickly amended it to say that “consecutive shit” was her original word intention; as in: bemoaning a series of disasters that had befallen the person she was talking about. Perhaps you had to be there.
Those who know her will appreciate the skilful way in which precisely the wrong words are used in every day situations on a regular basis that at the same time sound completely correct. She claims it isn’t a test to see who’s listening when she talks. I have my doubts.
TimMaidment.Com 